"A riot is the language of the unheard." - MLK
Last evening at 4:30 rush hour, two groups of activists in Milwaukee shut down I-43, the massive freeway that bisects the city. In a highly coordinated effort, cars moved through the already crawling traffic, fanned out across the north and southbound lanes, and stopped. People with signs got out and held the road for about 10 minutes, with helicopters circling overhead, traffic horns blaring, and police sirens wailing. By the time the police arrived, everyone was gone, everything back to the normal Friday evening crawl, though the police continued to create their own disturbances to the system as they hunted for the perpetrators. While mass arrests were made in another area near an onramp, there were no arrests in the actual highway blockade. I am interested in exploring the efficacy and ethics of aggressive acts of civil disobedience such as this:
Of course, the Right excoriates anything we would do, and propagates accusations of lawlessness, thuggery, criminality, outside agitation, anarchism and terrorism. However, I’ve also read many comments from people I would consider active in populist movements who are perhaps not as fanciful in their exhortations as our rightwing respondents, but just as intolerant and judgmental in their dismissal, as seen in these comments from friends in Facebook threads:
The Supreme Court ruled making people stay at work an extra 20 min for free is okay. I suppose you think that's unjust. But making these same innocent workers wait in traffic is okay? This is BULLSHIT!
(IF) …I took a shit on your front door step. I don't know how that will improve the situation but it's what I've decided to do. Don't criticize my action; I've done THIS because blocking traffic isn't working.
I have little patience for wasting time on misdirected or even non-directed tantrums. the blocking highways protest is just too dumb to consider it as an effective means of empowering positive social change. it will make more enemies and more arrest records. wrong direction. bad idea.
While only playing a very small support role, I went into the action with some reluctance based upon the issues of ethics and efficacy that were both anticipated and emergent:
1) what about people who are rushing to the hospital, in emergency, etc?
2) why inconvenience people that are “innocent” regarding the “cause”
3) doing this just pisses people off and makes you look silly or stupid
4) how does shutting something down help (stopping traffic in this case) further your cause?
We on the Left, particularly within the context of what has happened in the state of Wisconsin, talk about "lost opportunities for a general strike" when we were dissuaded from direct action activism and channelled into recall politics. I’ve heard and read many wistful fantasies about French tractorcades and truck stoppages, about work walk outs, about MLK inspired civil disobedience, about die-ins and round dances that shut down malls, about new and emergent systems that disrupt capital. We talk about all that, and cite brutal epochs of labor history, yet the Left gets really shaky when there is an uncomfortable push like what happened on the highway yesterday. Is it true that that the definition of a liberal, as credited to the late David Velasquez, “is the person who runs out of the room when the fighting begins?” Shouldn’t we be
more uncomfortable than we are regarding issues that never get resolved? Does the dominant race of the protestors, in this case African American, change the tolerance level of white activists, who seem quick with a sense of propriety and, to use a term from Deleuze, “expert-thinking?”
As if to suggest, somehow, that our resistance will be tidy and contained. It should be time-respecting, clocked for comfort, property-respecting and always within the bounds of gentility and civility, never an inconvenience, and never causing discomfort or danger. It should be “smart” as defined by experts in civil disobedience who know what works and are able predict both the immediate and longterm future. It will “work” according to plan, even if we are to understand that nothing works, and the state of “nothing working” is a delightful nullifying irony that, well, works for us?
I think that the point of something like the highway action is that
it can be done and that there is power in action, that systems aren't as robust as authorities want to think, and that an unhappy people leads to an unstable society. It becomes a model for more contained and less extreme actions as well, and begins to allow for conversations, such as this one, that come from disturbance and lead to growth. As a friend in a Facebook thread stated:
One of the things it's easy to forget is just how much interdependence is built into how a modern society functions. Just for things to work normally, a billion acts of cooperation have to happen every day (when the bus arrives at the stop, people line up politely and get on one at a time, etc.) And we don't think about all that cooperation, we don't even notice it. But when people STOP being so cooperative, then we MIGHT start to think about how dependent we are on others not making our lives difficult, and how that MIGHT mean that we can't take entire populations and write them off as "not my problem."
You should come hang out in Milwaukee’s inner city. There is trauma and hopelessness, beauty and courage, resignation and resolution. There are people in sorrow and people in struggle and people surviving massive historical forces of racism, bigotry and white supremacy. Talk to black activists who are desperate to be heard. Honestly, I just try to shut up and listen and learn in this community. Their strength is an inspiration. I get to come back to my very nice home, and, if arrested, the $700 ticket is serious, yes, but not overwhelming for my finances. It isn’t the difference between rent or not rent, between groceries or not groceries. As another friend on the same Facebook thread stated:
We are all part of this unjust, inhumane system. Huge numbers of people, including commuters, have minimal consciousness of their participation in that system, or of the brutal effects it has on large numbers of people with whom they might never come in contact in their segregated daily lives, and this is particularly true in the Milwaukee area. Organizing folks to disrupt one small part of it with a clear message has two purposes: It is a way to help those who are ignorant of the brutality of the system to wake up, and also, perhaps more importantly, it is a way to build confidence and power in the struggle to transform the system.
"But they deserve arrest for breaking the law," as a white activist friend on Facebook stated. I've seen cops in Madison licking their chops and mass arresting people singing songs in the rotunda. I’ve experienced threats for standing in public places with lighted letters. I’ve seen mercenary soldiers in the northern forests of Wisconsin, hired to guard sites of cancerous extraction. I've seen the rule of law flaunted in our state house to the point where the only point left is power. The police state veneer is oiled with fear. We are on notice here in Milwaukee that we have the National Guard on the ready for when the inevitable results arrive - any day now - and our justice system pronounces the cop who pumped fourteen bullets into the body of an unarmed Black man last May “not guilty.”
Last night, while waiting for the 73 people arrested to be released, the mostly African American activists left were chanting and dancing in front of the police station. There was a chant, very musical and funny, that went like this: “Who shuts shit down? … WE shut shit down! …WHO shuts shit down? …WE shut shit down!” The press had gone home, and the police, seeing their opportunity, brought out the dogs. Everyone was peaceful, chanting, singing, holding signs. They brought out the dogs. They grabbed a woman who was not doing anything different than anyone else, dragged her inside, and brought out the dogs.
The medium is the message. Dogs are a message. Random acts of malicious policing are a message. Stopping traffic in order to be paid attention to is a message. What else is working? The city can be totally disrupted by a few people with a long term grievance that is never, never, ever addressed. It is never, never, ever addressed. What forms, in this nice world of schedules, authority and polite propriety should protest take? This is an open question, and a crucial one.